According to oral tradition, the Navajo (Dineh) came into being by emerging through three worlds—the Black World, the Blue-Green World, and the Yellow World—before finally reaching the Glittering World, the one they still inhabit in the American Southwest. This story, told from generation to generation for hundreds of years, is believed by some scholars to confirm their own theories of how the Navajo came to live in their homeland. According to archaeological evidence, the early Navajo traveled through the Arctic to central Canada and on to the Rocky Mountain region before settling in the lands they occupy today. In their creation story, the Black World seems to correspond to the cold, harsh environment of the Arctic, the Blue-Green World to the Canadian forests, and the Yellow World to the mountains and plains on the Rockies’ eastern slope.
Like the Navajo’s, the ancestors of all Indians experienced a southward migration in the distant past, according to the Bering Strait Theory. The theory holds that during the last ice age, the waters of the strait separating Siberia from Alaska withdrew, exposing between Asia and North America a land bridge that ancient hunters unwittingly crossed while following herds of large game. (The ancestors of the Inuit and Aleut are believed to have arrived in North America during a much later migration, perhaps navigating the strait in skin boats.) Although generally accepted by archaeologists and other scholars, some Indians contest the Bering Strait Theory, observing that their creation stories hold that their people were created in their traditional homelands.
Once in North America, early Indians fanned across the continent, following herds of large game they hunted for food. Beginning in about 11,000 B. C., a warming climate forced changes in their way of life. With rising temperatures, game animals such as the mammoth and mastodon began to die out. At the same time, new plants and animals emerged that were better equipped to survive in the changing environment. Indians themselves adapted by taking advantage of these new food sources. Living as gatherers and small-game hunters, they were able to inhabit all reaches of North America by about 9000 B. C.
About two thousand years later, Indians in Mexico developed still another means of increasing their food stores. At that time, they started
Before 1492
Cultivating wild plants, such as beans and pumpkins. Their early farming experiments began to reap greater benefits when they started growing an early variety of maize, or Indian corn, in about 5000 B. C. After several thousand years of experimentation, Mexican Indians created a hearty hybrid corn plant that produced large enough crops to change significantly their way of life. Coming to rely increasingly on farmed foods, they gradually shifted away from hunting and gathering and toward a settled agricultural lifestyle. As farmers, the Indians had a more reliable source of food; their populations could grow larger, with less chance of famine. The cultivation of maize thus made possible the great ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, including the Olmec (ca. 1500 B. C. to A. D. 300), the Maya (ca. A. D. 300 to
A. D. 1500), the Toltec (ca. A. D. 900 to A. D. 1200), and the Aztec (ca. A. D. 1430 to A. D. 1517).
As the knowledge of farming spread northward, it had an equally significant impact on Indians in what is now the United States and Canada. In areas where farming was difficult or where other food sources were extremely plentiful (for instance, fish in the Pacific Northwest and wild plant foods in present-day California), people continued to live in small tribal groups. In the Midwest and Southwest, however, agriculture allowed Indians to develop urban areas as large and sophisticated as those in Mexico.
In the Midwest emerged the Adena (ca. 1000 B. C. to A. D. 200), the Hopewell (ca. 200
B. C. to A. D. 400), and the Mississippian cultural traditions (ca. A. D. 700 to A. D. 1550). The early peoples of these cultures are now commonly known as the Mound Builders, for the massive burial mounds they constructed in their ceremonial and trade centers. For instance, Cahokia, the largest Mississippi urban center, had a population of more than 20,000 and featured the enormous Monk’s Mound, which was larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt. The presence of such massive structures puzzled non-Indian archaeologists of the nineteenth century. Regarding the Indians of the Mississippi valley as too primitive to have constructed the great mounds, they developed a succession of bizarre theories, attributing the structures to Phoenicians, Egyptians, Aztec, Danes, and Hindus.
In the Southwest, farming allowed for the development of the Mogollon (ca. A. D. 200 to A. D. 1400), the Hohokam (ca. A. D. 400 to A. D. 1500), and the Anasazi (200 B. C. to A. D. 1400) cultures. These early peoples constructed large adobe houses in villages whose burgeoning populations were sustained by agricultural products and items obtained through trade with other Indians—sometimes groups living more than a thousand miles away. The greatest trade network was established by the Anasazi, who are also known as cliff dwellers, because of their large adobe structures they built in the sides of mountains. At their height, the Ana-sazi lived in large pueblo settlements along Chaco Canyon, an area that served as their trade and administrative center. More than 250 miles of road connected outlying pueblos to the canyon, allowing for an easy flow of food and trade goods between Anasazi communities.
By the late 15 th century, the great southwestern civilizations had largely disappeared. Possibly due to climactic changes, it seems to have become impossible for the Indians of these cultures to farm enough food to feed their growing settlements. Over time, they abandoned their urban centers to live in smaller tribal groups, like those of most other Indians in North America. Despite their small size, these groups over thousands of years had created highly sophisticated methods of surviving and even thriving in the wide variety of environments the continent offered—from the forbidding deserts of the Great Basin to the lush forests of the Eastern Woodlands to the frozen tundra of the Arctic. As Christopher Columbus set his sights westward, however, the Indian peoples of North America were about to face a new and possibly even greater challenge—protecting the ways of life they had so laboriously developed from an enemy often intent on destroying them.
World History
